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Tuesday March 01

LifeLogger.com

Lifelogger.com is a textamerica.com wannabe that's licensed for the Malaysian mobile phone service providers. The business plan is simple: maximise the use of the MMS service of the local service providers thereby increasing revenue from the charges for each MMS. But one thing missing from it (which is on textamerica) is RSS feeds for each blogger. RSS feeds allow the building of the community and the usefulness of lifelogger.com.

RSS feeds can be used to:

1. Create a list of the most popular (and most viewed) photos
2. Create a list of the most recent uploaded photos
3. Create a list of photos from each blogger
4. Create a list of random photos from recent uploads

Kind of like del.icio.us meets textamerica. With RSS, lifelogger could allow people to display their recent photos on their blog, just like textamerica does. And let's not forget how the link backs to the main site will benefit it in terms of its Pagerank.

RSS feeds are very simple to implement and I'm surprised lifelogger hasn't done it already since the engine is obviously based on easymoblog, the open source moblog software in PHP. And easymoblog already has the basis for these feeds built into the CMS. I think the silliest thing of all is the CMS developers had to actually expend resources taking the RSS parsing code out! Lifelogger.com could easily trump the other popular moblog site, flickr.com, on this because flickr hasn't implemented these RSS feeds yet.

http://lifelogger.com/

Comments

LifeLogger is not based on easymoblog or any other open source system.

Also, RSS is a coming-soon feature—which means that we didn’t expend any resources to take RSS features out. LifeLogger may be lacking some wishful features, but it is moving forwards, not backwards.

Ok Tim. Cut the crap and go get DiGi and a camera phone!

I seriously doubt that lifelogger was not based on easymoblog. You can’t deny that Malaysian programmers are always taught to seek out existing softwares and snatch code from them. It is a standard procedure and a matter of some practicality. In any case, it is not a point worth arguing over.

On the other point, the barrier to switching mobile phone providers is too high for contract phone users of which I am one. Penalties, loss of benefits and massive inconveniences will be incurred. It might not be so high for prepaid phone users since they are always keen to cut costs and their barriers to switching are much lower since the loss of benefits are lower too. So you can expect prepaid users to be more willing to switch mobile phone providers.

I think lifelogger’s market at this point of product introduction is contract phone users market since they are generally more affluent and therefore more likely to have upmarket phone models that include cameras.

If Digi is keen on switchers then they’ll find a bigger and more willing market among prepaid phone users who want to upgrade to a contract at the same time. At that window of opportunity, the costs of switching are almost the same as the costs of upgrading.

With a high penetration rate almost similar to that of Japan, this market is close to maturing so the battle ground of prepaid switchers is becoming more important to mobile phone providers who will be looking for value-added services like lifeblogger. But such services will not be cited as one of the main reasons for switching—costs will always be the top priority for prepaid phone users.

I just looked at easymoblog, and it’s really different. I highlighy recommend that you actually try out LifeLogger and post a few snaps before making doubts or claims about it.

Anyway, I can’t fight baseless speculation. It’s rampant over the net - especially amongst Malaysians ;)

Only one way to settle this.

If the project manager says that he was aware of easymoblog and had looked at the code at any time during the coding stage, I win.

dude, i’m admired by your zealous efforts on checking out lifelogger.com’s whois info. keep me posted.

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